TRADEOFFS

Using bsdutils in place of GNU coreutils does come with some
tradeoffs.  The list below highlights some of these that you should
consider before making the switch:


Some commands do not exist
--------------------------

The following commands are specific to GNU coreutils and are not part
of a BSD base system but have alternatives:

    COMMAND    DESCRIPTION                    ALTERNATIVE
    dir        list directory contents        ls
    dircolors  color setup for ls             ls supports color (-G)
    vdir       vertical 'dir' command         ls
    hostid     print numeric host identifier  none - dropped in 4.4BSD

The following commands are specific to GNU coreutils and have no
alternative provided by a BSD system:

    COMMAND    DESCRIPTION
    nproc      print number of processing units available
    pinky      lightweight finger


Lack of long options
--------------------

This is a usability thing, but if you have a lot of scripts that use
the long options for GNU coreutils commands, you will have to change
those to short options with bsdutils.  Keep in mind the short options
often vary between GNU and BSD commands.  See each command's man page
for more details.


No support for SELinux
----------------------

The ls(1) command from GNU coreutils can display SELinux information
in file listings.  Since this is Linux-specific, the bsdutils do not
have support for it.  If you don't need this or don't care about
SELinux, then the bsdutils should be functionally equivalent for you.

Some commands have FreeBSD mac.h functionality which is sort of like
SELinux on Linux.  Those commands have had the mac.h functionality
removed, but they would be an ideal starting point for flipping that
over to SELinux on Linux systems.


No translations
---------------

The bsdutils commands come with very simple untranslated help output
and an English language man page.  There may be translated man pages
in the FreeBSD source tree (we should look for those), but the
commands themselves don't output text in other languages.  However,
text manipulation commands and things like ls(1) do work with UTF-8
encodings and wide characters.